What a relief to see the horseradish in the farm stands! I was down to a tablespoon from last year’s batch and that tablespoon was looking pretty brown, and had lost almost all its oomph. But now I am back in the saddle, with one half pint in the fridge and two half pints in the freezer.

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Last year's horseradish is the brown stuff. It discolors as it ages.

I cannot emphasize enough how glad you will be if you prepare your own horseradish. It is so much tastier than commercial products, and the slightly coarse texture allows for more flexibility in its use. I use it whenever I marinate meats and poultry. In fact, right now I have a couple of duck breasts marinating in a tablespoon of fresh horseradish, bay, thyme, rosemary, sage, and salt.

This time of year I am desperate for fresh greens. The spinach isn’t in the markets yet, and the asparagus are just beginning to arrive. Ramps are in, and they are great as a compliment to foods. I sauté them and toss them with spaghetti and breadcrumbs; and cook them in parchment with fish filet. I recently made a ramps pesto (see my post of 5/6/09) and froze a couple of half pints, and used the rest to cook with soft-shelled crabs. It made a marvelous sandwich. Just sauté the crabs in a non-stick skillet with some olive oil and minced garlic. As soon as the crabs become opaque and the shell becomes pink, add a couple of tablespoons of ramps pesto per crab. Toss the crabs in the pesto, add salt and black pepper to taste, and serve on toast with a lightly dressed arugula salad. (A tip about buying crabs: touch their shells. If they feel leathery they will be tough when you cook them. But if they feel papery they’ll be perfect.)

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Soft-shelled crab tossed in fava cream

(It’s good with fava bean crema as well. The recipe for fava bean crema is in my book Well-Preserved.) But even so, ramps and fiddleheads just don’t cut it when you want to dig into a big bowl of vegetables.

So I was very happy when I encountered a shelf full of feral greens at a farm stand in Watermill, Long Island recently. A farmer is going to harvest as many of his vegetables as he can, and then plant a new crop in the spring from seed. But some of those vegetables get away from him and go to seed. A feral green is the spindly, wild looking vegetable that comes up from those seeds. There isn’t much of a market for them, but that’s because most consumers don’t know how absolutely fantastic they are.

I’ve been in book production the last two weeks. For the writer, that involves a lot of housekeeping: Inputting editorial changes, correcting notes styles, writing the front and back matter. Rodale’s brilliant art director (and mycophile) Amy King came up with this cover.

Anyway, the book has been eating up a lot of time, so I’m behind on my posts. I’ll try to catch up.

Shortly after putting up the lemon curd I made a dessert with it that is pretty indulgent: stuffed ricotta balls. My parents often served ricotta balls as a dessert, and both adults and kids love them. It’s just ricotta, eggs, sugar and Marsala or brandy, baking powder, and a bit of flour. The batter is dropped into hot oil and the fried balls are garnished with powdered sugar. They are light and delightful. Some chefs serve the ricotta ball with a molten interior. It is very easy to fry the balls too fast, in which case the interior will be undercooked. I wouldn’t intentionally go for this. To me it tastes raw. What you want is a just cooked, soft interior with a delicately crunchy exterior. The way you achieve that is control the heat of your oil, and don’t use too much oil. Halfway up the ball—around 1 inch–is enough.

I’ve stuffed ricotta balls with jam (various types—strawberry was great) and with chocolate pudding (the same that I use in a chocolate meringue pie). The lemon curd is definitely my favorite though. It’s easy. You just need a pastry bag with a narrow metal nozzle that you can insert into the ricotta ball.

I was so happy to find the following recipe for lemon curd, tested by the University of Georgia for the National Center for Home Food Preservation, but I was not so excited to prepare it because I don’t often have bottled lemon juice on hand—it’s not my favorite product. I’ve made lemon curd with Meyer lemons, and it is delicious, but Meyers aren’t acidic enough to can safely, what with all that egg protein (I have made frozen Meyer lemon curd though, and it is delicious).

So as far as canning goes, I set the recipe aside. Then I read Linda Ziedrich’s most recent post “Real Lemon versus ReaLemon,” which pretty definitively establishes that real lemon juice can be substituted for bottled lemon juice in recipes, and I was re-inspired to make the curd. Her splendid blog, A Gardener’s Table, is an excellent source for canners, both in terms of science, safety, and originality of recipes. (I highly recommend her books, too.) http://agardenerstable.com/2011/04/19/real-lemon-versus-realemon/

Usually I just use lobster sauce to bump up the flavor of a fish recipe. For example, a dish I commonly make is to cook spaghettini in fish stock (that I’ve made myself or bought from the fish monger), and separately heat minced garlic, herbs, salt and pepper in oil, and tossed them together.

When I have lobster reduction on hand, I will heat it up separately and toss it with the pasta, too. Or if I am cooking skate wings or some other flat fish, I’ll poach the filets or wings in a little fish stock or water flavored with bay, parsley, and peppercorns, remove the fish and reduce the liquid, and add a tablespoon of lobster reduction and a knob of butter, and then return the fish to the pan to pick up the nice brown color and lobstery flavor.

Last week I went to the orchid show at the New York Botanical Gardens nybg.org a beautiful, exuberant show featuring hundreds of species of orchids. There I saw the orchid plant that produces vanilla seedpods, and it got me thinking; I just spent $7.99 on two ounces of a supermarket brand vanilla extract. Why aren’t I making it myself?

So yesterday I got it going. I did some research and make three half-cup bottles of extract; vanilla, candy cap mushroom, and lemon. They need to rest for about four weeks.

Springtime on Long Island (last year--it's supposed to snow this week)

Last weekend Kevin and I went out to our little cottage on Long Island to air the place out and clean up. The cottage is near a terrific fish store, the Clamman, and since we worked so hard to get the cottage open and livable, we treated ourselves and our friends Sean and Steve to a couple of lobsters.

I’ve had to cook a number of meals lately: a small dinner for 6 for my friend Dan Malloy, who was the lay reader on my forthcoming book Mycophilia: spaghettini with sea urchin mayonnaise, baked scrod with black olive sauce, wild goose cooked forever in red wine and bay, a green salad, and panna cotta with candy cap mushroom sauce; a dinner for 24 for the architect Simon Velez. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simón_Vélez

Antipasto: roasted red peppers with shrimp, boiled baby potatoes with smoked trout—by the way, to get the smell of trout off your fingers, wash your hands with toothpaste—and marinated mushrooms with scallops, then chicken canzanese (braised with prosciutto, sage, and cloves) and broccoli rape, pronounced rah-pei (rabe is dialect) mixed with regular broccoli, and beans cooked in goose stock (made from the bones from Dan’s goose), green salad with cheeses and poached pears; a dinner for 10 for Henny Abraham, widow of the architect Raimund, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raimund_Abraham who’s work was celebrated at a recent show at The Cooper Union: Mushroom bisque, bollito misto—short ribs, chicken thighs, cotechino, vegetables–watercress salad, semi-sweet fruit strudels…

I serve poached pears for dessert all winter long: they are easy to prepare and delicious after any meal: fish, elk, whatever. I don’t even worry about having specific ingredients. As long as I have juice of some sort (I’ve even used the Italian soda, Orangina), wine, sugar, and a few dried whole spices, I’m good to go.

A couple of years ago it occurred to me that canning pears is like poaching pears, and since the poaching liquid is acidic (juice and wine) why not simply let the canning process be the poaching? (Okay, it’s actually boiling.)

Two weeks ago I wrote about making walnut sauce, which I first had with chicken in Egypt last year. The walnut sauce freezes and defrosts very well. I made two dishes with my two half pints of walnut sauce since then, and I loved them both: Stuffed poblanos with walnut sauce, and my version of Cicassian chicken, poached chicken with walnut sauce. It was really nice to have the walnut sauce on hand for both dishes, as it cut down on preparation time and general what’s-for-dinner anxiety. Here are the recipes.

Eugenia Bone, a veteran food writer who has published in many national magazines and newspapers, is also a cookbook author. She is the author of Well-Preserved (Clarkson Potter 2009). She has contributed to many cookbooks and a few literary journals, been nominated for a variety of food writing awards and participated in radio, interactive and online interviews, in addition to appearing multiple times on television. She lives in New York City and Crawford, Colo.

The secret to tasty food is homemade and seasonal. To do that, you've got to put up food. Well-Preserved reports on small batch preservation year round, and generates recipes from those preserved foods.